“Duma, are you with me now?” I asked cautiously, ready to grab my swords again if he didn’t answer.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he said hoarsely.
Relieved, I dropped my arms to my sides and began searching the room. “Where the hell could he have gone?”
“I don’t think I even saw him move,” Duma replied, finally removing the knife from the henchman’s throat, returning it to its sheath.
The guy quickly backed into the wall then scooted along it away from Duma. Ignoring him, Duma bent down and helped Gracen back to his feet. Beyond the bumps and bruises, everyone was acting more subdued as they gathered themselves. Though they all eyed me, it was more out of apprehension than aggression. I was hopeful that the influence had waned with the absence of the Hanner Brid.
“Dammit!” I bolted as fast as I could to Gracen, who was still struggling to breathe normally. “I told you we weren’t here to hurt you guys. That was the bastard we were after.” I waved my hands in the direction the Hanner Brid had been standing, then threw them up in exasperation, lolled my head back, and stared at the ceiling.
“Sorry about… you know…” Duma said, rolling one hand but looking me square in the eye this time.
“Can you find him again?” I asked, dismissing his comment. I knew he wasn’t acting of his own accord. Besides, I was far more upset that the fucker had gotten away. Again.
“It’s going to take some time.” Duma walked through one of the many doors that lined the edges of the warehouse’s interior and closed it behind him. I assumed the doors led to individual rooms or storage areas, but given my luck recently, they probably led directly to the gates of hell.
Chapter 21
I stared at the floor in silence for a minute while everyone else in the room began to pick themselves back up and collect their wits. All of them gave me a wide berth. Gracen began to gather up the smaller pieces of smashed furniture and toss them into the trash piles against the walls. His henchmen followed suit.
The taller of the two hooded goons brushed his hood back as he and the smaller one dragged the flattened couch off to a corner. I found myself confused as I watched him. Understandably, he refused to make eye contact with me.
“His mother was an Elf,” said the female whirling dervish from behind me. She had apparently noticed I was staring. I tried to pretend I wasn’t, but it was hard not to.
“That makes sense,” I replied quietly. “His eyes are distinctly Elvish.” Their size and dark solid color had caught my attention the minute he’d pushed his hood back. They also revealed an alert intelligence and a shiftiness I didn’t like. “But the rest of him…” He had large pointed ears, massive jagged teeth, high cheekbones, a beak of a nose, and skin the hue of someone who was recently deceased.
“His father, a Goblin, raped her. She died giving birth to him.” She grimaced, rubbing at her upper arm. “I told you, we are all half-breeds here. Even Gracen. Outcasts, each and every one.”
I shook my head, watching her swing her arm as if testing it. “I apologize. I meant you no harm, I swear. But how did he get in here without you guys knowing it? I watched your reactions. You guys clearly didn’t know he was here. Duma made it sound like getting in here was like breaking into Fort Knox.”
“I don’t know about the others, but I certainly had no idea that anyone other than the five of us and you two were here. And I have no idea how he would have gotten past the two door guards.”
“There are no other ways in or out?” I asked.
“Not unless you go through the walls, floor, or ceiling. And good luck with that.” She raised her arm and winced.
Gracen threw down a broken table leg. “The only way in or out is the way you came. I paid for some serious enchantments to protect this place, and they’re all still intact.”
I could still see the magical energy that covered this place. Frustrated, I started to grab some of the broken furniture in an effort to appear friendly and cooperative, but I was still mostly focused on what I should do next. Duma was taking an awful long time in that room. Every minute that passed was an eternity, letting the Hanner Brid get farther and farther away.
“Hey, someone give me a hand,” a voice called from near the entrance. “The Doormen are destroyed.”
“Dammit.” Gracen coughed as he headed over.
I followed. At the entryway, parts of two humanoid figures lay on the floor among metal debris and clods of dirt. I’d known the one being in the entry wasn’t flesh and blood when I’d first encountered it, but I hadn’t even seen the second. “Golems?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Gracen knelt beside one of the carcasses, sifting through fragments. “Both inset with bronze armor and skeletons. Shit.”
Golems were rare and very expensive automatons, so I understood why Gracen was ticked off. It also explained the magic around the being in the entryway. I knelt over one of the heads and noted that it had a bullet hole in its forehead right at the end of a word formed into the clay.
I prodded the bullet hole. “The bullet to the head alone wouldn’t be enough to kill this thing, but what the bullet obliterated was.”
Gracen nodded. “Yeah, these golems were directly inscribed to bring them to life. I thought it would be stronger than hanging their animating enchantment on them.”
“Few know that removing that inscription would disable it, and fewer still could survive doing it,” I said.
The Hanner Brid had shot both of the constructs precisely in very specific parts of their inscriptions, changing the Hebrew word emet, meaning truth, to met, meaning death. Obliterating the letter “aleph” had utterly destroyed them.
I stood up, shaking my head in disbelief. “You’re lucky it was only Igg and Ook, here, and not one of you,” I said, returning to what was left of the seating area.
Several hours later, I was becoming concerned that Duma still hadn’t come out of that room, but since finding the Hanner Brid involved all that touchy-feely energy manipulation magic-y stuff and tracking movement through the Ways, I decided I’d probably better wait. In the meantime, I continued to help pick up the mess that I was forced to create. Over the next several hours of cleaning, the woman insisted on talking to me despite my efforts to ignore her. My patience was gone, and I wasn’t in the mood to socialize.
“My name is Aislin, and I’m half-human, half-Nephele Vila,” she said.
“Really? A cloud nymph,” I replied, surprised and impressed, having never seen one before. I realized that despite her half-human ancestry, she was exactly how I’d pictured a cloud nymph. My surprise stemmed from the fact that all types of Vila were rare because they were one of the three most notorious races of the Anseelie Fae. Both Fae Courts branded them—along with the Peri, Blud, and a few other extinct races—as traitors and hunted them mercilessly. I hadn’t seen any kind of Vila in over a thousand years, and the Hanner Brid was the first Blud I’d ever encountered. If I were on a Fae scavenger hunt, I would have been in the lead for sure.
“My friend Tolfin there”—she pointed at her giant companion, who was struggling to pick up the remnants of the table with his massive fingers—“is half troll and half ogre.”
That has to be the worst combination ever.
“He’s big, clumsy, and unfortunately, mute, but he’s incredibly intelligent. In fact, he has an aptitude for complex computational mathematics, which he can do in his head—something that is way beyond human capabilities.”
I grunted. “He also obviously likes you.”
“We watch out for each other.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Gracen is half Peri and half Sidhe. He owns this place and runs it with the help of his two buddies, the Goblin-Elf and the little guy. Nobody knows much about the little guy, except that he has pitch-black skin, but the rumors are the three of them have traveled together for centuries. Those two n
ever speak to anyone but Gracen.”
I had assumed Duma and Abraxos were the last of their kind, though the fact they weren’t didn’t surprise me. They were secretive by nature and necessity, and in the scheme of things, they had no reason to tell me about some other Anseelie fae in hiding. On the other hand, that no one knew anything about the little black-skinned guy bothered me. Even more troublesome was that I hadn’t seen the little guy since before we found the destroyed golems. It just added to my growing unease.
I decided I’d waited long enough for Duma. Before I could kick in his door, he opened it, gaunt and exhausted, which for him was saying something.
“It ain’t good,” he replied, exhaling heavily.
“Good or bad, I’m after him. Just tell me where he ended up.”
“Well, I knew he would most likely head to the park to get back to the same nexus point we used, so I had to give him time to get there and then get to a final destination, or it would have been like playing geographic bingo.” He found a functional chair and flopped into it.
Duma was dragging out his explanation, and the delay tactic was not lost on me. “Okay, fine, so where is he now?”
“Well, the blood we have is drying up, so it’s starting to become harder to get a solid fix on him.” He closed his eyes, rolling his shoulders.
I threw my hands up, stared at the ceiling for a second and then back to Duma, tapping my foot. “Fine, I get it. It’s hard work. Now where the hell is he?”
Duma hung his head. “Laszlovara.”
“Good, let’s… wait…” The name sank in. “You mean the Coronini Commune? In Romania?” I couldn’t help but cringe.
The slaughterhouses of the Chicago Stockyards during the late nineteenth century were a playground on a pleasant spring day compared to Coronini.
“Yeah,” he replied.
Everyone in the room eyed us without saying a word. All eyes were wide except Aislin’s; her face was scrunched in confusion.
I dropped my head in frustration. Shit.
Chapter 22
“What’s the big deal about Laszlovara?” Aislin asked, breaking the cemetery-like silence in the room.
“You will have to forgive her,” Gracen replied. “She’s young.”
“It’s an utter nightmare is what it is,” Duma said, pushing himself to his feet to pace.
“I gathered as much by all of your reactions,” Aislin said. “But that doesn’t explain why.”
“Vampires,” I said without facing her. “Laszlovara is the region’s historic name. Everyone knows it now as Coronini—a working commune that lies right on the banks of the Danube in Romania, right across the river from Serbia. And it’s the home of the Liuntika Strigoi—the oldest and most powerful vampire coven in existence.”
“Not to mention it’s probably also Lilith’s—the freakin’ Mother of all Strigoi—refuge,” Duma said.
“And there’s that,” I replied. “You’re positive about the location?”
“Very,” Duma said. “He hasn’t moved significantly in the last hour. I checked several times to make damn sure.”
Wonderful. I recalled my first foray into the area in the late ninth century, when I fought with the Magyars against the Bulgarians and Emperor Simeon I, mostly because Simeon made a pact with the vampires of the region to grant them protection and land within his realm. We won the first battle, but I barely escaped after I publicly killed a vampire envoy that had enthralled my commander. Unfortunately, in the battle that followed, the vampires pushed the Magyars back to what is now Csepel Island in Budapest, where King Arpad finally built a fortress to hold them back.
The vampires, rumored to be led by Lilith herself, eventually retreated south along the Danube to an area that became known as Laszlovara. The early Hungarians fought many wars with these Strigoi over the area, which was famous for its gold and iron mines, and eventually even erected a stronghold there named after one of their greatest kings and warriors—and vampire killers—Saint Ladislaus. The provisional human outpost and their control over the area did not last. And we still had no human, or even nonhuman, allies in the area we could count on to help us find the Hanner Brid.
“Vampires are a human problem, not ours,” Gracen said. “Besides, if that’s where the Demon Fae went, then I say good riddance. They’ll kill him the moment he trespasses on their land. They don’t tolerate outsiders.”
“Possibly,” I replied. “I don’t know how many vampires are there, but there are about two thousand human inhabitants living in that commune, and all of them—including the slave traders and smugglers that use the area as a base—are thralls working for and protecting the Strigoi living in the nearby caverns and mines. The thralls won’t stand a chance against this guy.”
Of all the creatures and beings I’d dealt with in my long life, I despised vampires the most. All of them—from the immortal Strigoi that live off human blood to the mortal Moroi that live off human energy—were parasites and perversions of humanity. And they all deserved to die. While other creatures and beings try to use humans or even twist us to their wills, vampires simply used us for food, and that I couldn’t abide. And I get to head into their capital city to chase an even bigger proctological nuisance. Yay!
“You think they’ll give us permission to search for this prick on their land?” I asked Duma, already knowing the answer.
“Not likely,” he replied with a derisive snort. “We don’t even have time to ask, and I can’t even imagine trying to sneak into the place, either. No one steps foot on their land without their knowing it.”
“So if this Half Breed is there, then they know it. And maybe they even allowed it.” I didn’t like the implications of that.
Duma stopped in his tracks, his face stern. “What? You think he’s working for them?”
“Well, Athena mentioned that several smaller Strigoi covens have been attacked in recent days. It’s possible. Depressing, but possible,” I replied. “Why else would he go there? Like Gracen said, I don’t care how good he is, there is no way he could attack them by himself and survive. And like you said, there’s no way to even sneak into that place without them knowing. He could be doing wet work for them covertly while Lilith and her vampires remain under the radar. Her usual MO isn’t subtle, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Maybe he’s trying to throw you off his trail. Or maybe this Demon Fae is going to attack them…” the half goblin replied.
“It’s possible, but would you flee through Bouvet, much less attack the very Seat of the Unseelie Court, while you were being pursued?” I hoped my statement about the island stronghold of the Unseelie Court, the likely site of Queen Mab’s throne, would make my point to a Fae.
Someone grunted, but no one said anything.
“Exactly. No one would be that crazy,” I said turning to face Duma. “He’s working with them. He’s got to be.”
“Speaking of Bouvet…” said a familiar female voice.
Everyone froze, staring past me. I suddenly got chills and an odd sense of déjà vu.
I spun around to see Belphoebe and three other cloaked figures standing inside the doorway. All armed with long swords, the cloaked beings were significantly larger than the huntress. Then the smallest of Gracen’s entourage—the little black-skinned guy—stepped out from behind them. And the hits just keep on coming.
“Hi, Pheebs,” I said.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you?” she replied, glancing around the room rather than at me. She absently touched a chair then rubbed her fingers in disgust.
“To be honest, yeah, I was kinda hoping. At least long enough for me to find the sonofabitch that framed me,” I replied.
“So are you going to go the easy way or the hard way?” She grinned wolfishly. “Please say hard. Please.”
“Oh, you have no idea how hard…” I dropped to one knee and drew both my Sig and Glock, aiming at the two henchmen closest to Belphoebe. I put two rounds into one’s head, dropping him instantly, and at least three out of four rounds into the upper chest and head of the other. He stumbled to the side and fell across Gracen’s little helper, who let out a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan as they hit the floor.
I brought the guns to bear on the third cloaked figure while Belphoebe was already diving to her left. In a single fluid motion, she rolled behind one of the structural supports and came up with her bow in hand. I fired three more times into the third cloaked figure, hitting him center mass. A familiar dull thwap accompanied each impact. Body armor. Nevertheless, the shots caused the figure to stagger.
A cold breeze built behind me, then Aislin whirled past me, blades flashing in a cloudy mist, straight toward Belphoebe. Before I could say anything, Belphoebe drew down on the half-cloud nymph and fired two arrows in the blink of an eye. Aislin deflected one of the arrows and sent it ricocheting into the far wall with a woody thock, but the other arrow hit home and knocked Aislin from her spin, dropping her in a tangled heap. Across the room, Tolfin roared and flew into a rage.
Shit. Aislin and the rest of the motley crew were merely trying to survive in a world where they didn’t fit in, and I’d brought the Huntress from one of the most serious threats to their existence to their doorstep. If any of them died, it would be my fault. Except that little black-skinned guy.
Knives in hand, Duma shot past the last of the assailants at the door, leaving trails of yellow and green blood arcing behind. As Duma passed, the guard I’d shot got to his knees then toppled over, clutching his throat. Duma came to a sudden stop on one knee above Gracen’s little snitch-henchman, one blade low and behind him. The blade above his head dripped thick black liquid. The inky-skinned lackey went still under the figure that had fallen on him, and a dark pool rapidly formed around him.
Chaos Unbound (The Metis Files Book 2) Page 18